Dissonance
by Photogirl1890
Summary: Written for the VAMB 2015 Secret Summer exchange. B'Elanna finds herself envious of Tom's family.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Paramount/CBS. No copyright infringement is intended.

A/N: This was written for the 2015 VAMB Secret Summer exchange. **Nynaeve506** requested: "A Paris/Torres story where B'Elanna finds herself envious of what Tom had in terms of family and that creating tension for them." This is a series of three missing scenes set in the middle part of season four.

My most grateful thanks to **Delwin** for beta reading, for the title suggestion, and for the nudge I always need to sign up for anything involving a deadline.

* * *

 **Dissonance**

 **1\. Post-'Random Thoughts'. Stardate 51386**

"By the time I'd gotten to about thirteen, I'd started wishing that he'd be off-world on my birthday. What teenage kid wants a boring dinner with their parents with their dad using it as an excuse to review the previous year's academic achievements and set standards for the next? Where's the fun in that?"

B'Elanna tried to focus on her food and tune out of Tom's recollections: a difficult task given the lack of any other audible conversation in the now sparsely populated Paxau Resort program. Harry, sitting beside Tom and diagonally across the table from B'Elanna, chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of Jimbalian toffee tart, nodding along as Tom detailed the Paris family birthday traditions: a frosted chocolate cake, baked and decorated the previous day by Tom's mother or, on his mother's birthday, by one of his sisters, would be unveiled at breakfast time then hidden away again until the evening; old-fashioned paper cards would be opened at the table as the family sat together eating a breakfast of bacon, eggs and waffles. Presents were withheld until the school day was over, to be unwrapped in a controlled and pre-prescribed order as the evening's dinner roasted in the oven. To B'Elanna, it really didn't sound all that bad. In fact, it sounded quite appealing, and the more Tom rambled on in such a negative tone, the more irritated she became.

His pizza devoured down to the tiniest crumb, Tom pushed the empty plate aside and reached for his sizeable dessert. "It was the thought of the cake that got me through my father's sermons," he went on, before the chewing gum-like consistency of the tart – one of Neelix's concoctions which had, in this instance, served as Ensign Golwat's birthday cake – temporarily silenced his tongue.

They'd been late to the party: Tom held up on the bridge explaining a new navigational protocol to Crewman Grimes and both Harry and B'Elanna consulting on a problem with Gennaro in the geology lab. Most of the revellers had now called it a night. Golwat herself had overindulged on fermented Gallia nectar and had last been seen stumbling her way to sickbay, propped up between the strong arms of Vorik and Freddy Bristow.

Before her arrival on _Voyager_ it had been nearly twenty years since B'Elanna had herself been gifted with a birthday cake. Miral Torres had never been an enthusiast of such 'frivolous human traditions'. The only anniversary B'Elanna's mother had deemed worthwhile was that of her own Rite of Ascension, a day that, on Qo'noS, would have been spent enduring a ritual of chanting and painstiks in the company of close family and friends. While B'Elanna had never (despite her mother's urging) undergone the rite herself, she'd still been obligated to celebrate the anniversary of her mother becoming a fully-fledged Klingon warrior. The only similarity the day bore to a typical human birthday was in the presence of candles – stinking _kor'tova_ candles – and special foods. With the exact ingredients for her recipes rarely available on Kessik IV, Miral had substituted whatever she could source locally – ingredients that sometimes looked suspiciously like fishing bait and, at best, like the sandworms Principal Skinner would let his students feed to the grammar school's pet Entakian waterfowl. The painstiks had, thankfully, been omitted from proceedings, replaced by her mother's determination to torture herself by forgoing sleep for seven days straight. By the end of the week she'd been even more irascible than usual. And there was certainly no fun in _that_.

"B'Elanna?"

Looking up with a start, she met Harry's quizzical gaze. "Hmm?"

"I said: aren't you having any dessert?"

She glanced down and across at the multilayered slab on Tom's plate. At the steak knife he required to carve it up into bite-sized chunks. No wonder Chell had lost a molar.

"I think I'll pass, thanks," she replied, not even sure she could finish what was left of her salad. Besides the potential health hazard presented by the tart, at some time in the last five minutes she'd lost her appetite. And, thinking about it, she'd really not been all that hungry before beginning her meal.

"Another cocktail then?" Tom asked, beckoning to one of the resort's scantily clad female holograms who sauntered over with a tray of extravagantly garnished drinks that smelled strongly of real alcohol.

"Actually … I'm feeling pretty tired." Taking one last forkful of her meal, B'Elanna pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. "I'll see you in the morning."

Tom frowned. "But, I thought we were going anti-grav sailing out on the lagoon?"

"Tomorrow, maybe," she told him, before wishing both of her dining companions a good night and setting off towards the holodeck doors.

She wondered, at times, how differently her childhood might have been if she'd had a sibling or two. Her father might still have left – in fact, he might well have left even sooner – but, with a brother or a sister, B'Elanna would not have been the only human-Klingon hybrid in the colony. In the schoolyard she would have had an ally. And her mother would not have been the only other soul on the planet with an innate anger management issue – the only other person who could understand the struggle that B'Elanna faced just to get through a day without giving in to that inbuilt instinct to lash out at the slightest affront from one of the humans.

Tom spoke more freely of his sisters than he did of his parents. Like him, they'd been subjected to the same high expectations of their father. Like him they'd been encouraged to see the Galaxy in the same way that their father did. Encouraged to take responsibility and to revere Starfleet's ethical principles, in particular, the Prime Directive. But wasn't the pressure to succeed from a father with good intentions better than a complete lack of paternal guidance? Better than abandonment?

Entering her quarters, B'Elanna wasted no time in getting ready for bed, but, when her head hit the pillow, she found that sleep would not come easily. Tom's words had struck a nerve. Admittedly, given the day she'd had, she was already feeling hypersensitive: Carey had made the mistake of comparing the appearance of an oddly shaped meteoroid they'd beamed aboard for analysis to a Terran turtle shell. Then, she'd overheard Ensign Rollins telling Ensign Jenkins that one of the Klingon romance novels he'd 'accidentally stumbled across' when searching the ship's library for reading material had left him wanting an engramatic purge. B'Elanna could, on reflection, see both those incidents for what they were: not slights intended to upset her, merely comments spoken innocuously by persons ignorant of her presence or of the hurt that such statements might cause. But Tom … Tom should have known better, shouldn't he?


	2. Chapter 2

**2\. Pre-'Waking Moments' – Stardate 51440**

"This is where I had my first skiing lessons. On the slopes in the real Austria, I mean."

Tom gazed around fondly at the Alpine resort and B'Elanna had to admit it did look pretty. The sun blazed down on the immaculate white snow that blanketed almost every surface in sight. Quaint wooden chalets brightly painted in every conceivable colour dotted the lower reaches of the valley floor. On the large, open terrace where Tom and B'Elanna had entered the program, holograms – of varying proficiencies – were putting on their skis, laughing and joking around, some then making their way along a designated path to board the chairlift. Up on the mountain directly ahead, skilled skiers raced down the steepest and most challenging slopes at what appeared to be breakneck speeds.

Despite her thick ski suit and the thermal base layer she'd borrowed from _Voyager_ 's extreme environment expedition supplies, B'Elanna shivered. "Was it really this cold there?" The wind chill factor wasn't helping. The program hadn't been running for more than two minutes and her face already felt frosty.

"Well, I don't remember the exact temperature," said Tom. "I was only a kid. Seven or maybe eight years old. I came with my grandparents – on my mom's side – and a couple of cousins. We stayed for a week and I didn't want to go home at the end of it."

"Sounds like a nice vacation. If you like this kind of climate."

"Oh, it was. It was great. Good fun, good food. And we came back during the next four or five consecutive winters." The wistful look drained from Tom's features replaced, for a moment, by a hard frown. "Then my dad put an end to it. He wanted me to spend my entire school vacation studying at home. I snuck back a few times though. Just for an afternoon here and there when I thought my parents wouldn't notice."

With their skis slung over one shoulder and poles gripped in the opposite hands they started the long trek towards the top of a shallow rise that Tom had earmarked as 'suitable for the complete novice'. Tom had, to B'Elanna's exasperation, insisted that they replicate real equipment rather than use disposable holographic gear. What he really meant by 'real' was equipment fabricated to an early 21st-century specification, which, he claimed, would use less replicator rations, though B'Elanna was convinced it was purely an aesthetic choice.

"I got caught once," Tom went on. "A conference finished early and my dad came home to find the house empty. I tried to argue that I was using the ski slopes to learn about Newton's Laws of Motion, but he didn't believe me."

"I'm not surprised."

"He grounded me for a whole month."

B'Elanna couldn't hold back a disparaging laugh. "You think that's bad? My mom once grounded me for an entire semester."

"An entire semester? What did you do to deserve that?"

"I got into a fight at school. I didn't start it and … you know, I actually thought she'd be proud of me for sticking up for myself."

"And she wasn't?"

"No. It didn't reflect well on her. She was always concerned about us becoming the focus of negative attention, what with us being the only Klingons on the planet."

For that, Tom had no immediate comeback, and they walked for the next minute or so in silence but for the crunch of their boots in the soft snow beneath them. B'Elanna pulled her goggles down over her eyes. She had no problem with the intensity of the light, but the extra coverage would help her retain a little more body heat.

"Here," Tom said, halting then and lowering his skis to the ground. "This is the spot."

B'Elanna stopped beside him, a knot tightening in her stomachs. How many times had Chakotay attempted to persuade her to go skiing on the holodeck? And she'd refused point blank every time – out of an instinctive feeling that it really wasn't for her. But with Tom she'd given in on just the third or fourth invitation. Now that they were here, she genuinely wanted to have fun, preferably without making a fool of herself in the process. To make their relationship work in a closed in environment such as _Voyager_ , they needed to find and develop plenty of overlapping interests. She was more than willing to make compromises, but could offer no guarantees that she would enjoy everything that Tom found fun – however much he tried to stoke her enthusiasm.

In the same patient tone she'd heard him use a hundred times when explaining complex navigational or piloting problems to less educated individuals, Tom guided her through putting on her skis, at times pitching the lesson as if he were talking to someone who'd never ever seen snow before. To be fair, there was a world of difference between understanding the physics behind motion on the snow and putting that theory into practice while trying not to fall over. Tom knew that: he surely didn't intend to come off as condescending.

A couple of hours later and she'd mastered the most basic technique. She had a long way to go to catch up with Tom's two decades of experience – skiing wasn't something they'd be able to enjoy on an equal footing for some time. But it was proving more enjoyable than she'd expected it to be: another reminder that, when visiting the holodeck with Tom, she would do well to leave at least some of her preconceptions at the door.

"I still can't believe you've never tried this before."

"We didn't have ski resorts on Kessik IV."

"At the Academy then."

"I preferred to spend my leisure time at the running track or sitting on a Californian beach."

"Your mom never took you when you visited the Homeworld?"

As his eyes were covered by his goggles, B'Elanna could not immediately tell if Tom was joking. But, as no hint of a smirk began to show on his lips, she had to conclude he was serious. "Klingons skiing?" she said, after a pause, adding, "Can you imagine it?"

Tom shrugged. "Well, why not?"

"Klingons avoid snow and ice wherever possible. That's why not," B'Elanna replied, trying to keep her growing irritation out of her voice. "They don't use snow for recreation."

"But skiing's not just a form of recreation. It's a mode of transport. That's how it started on Earth. I just thought maybe-"

"On Qo'noS there are no residential areas above the winter snow line and there are no permanent settlements near the poles."

On Qo'noS – at least in the areas B'Elanna had visited – the temperature was always on the right side of freezing. But that was where her affinity for the planet ended. While Tom had been enjoying himself on what sounded like a series of idyllic family gatherings, she had been suffering through torturous encounters with her mother's relations: always the odd one out, smaller and more timid than her same-aged Klingon cousins – an oddity to be paraded in front of her cousins' surly friends. While Tom had been feasting on the likes of apple strudel and dumplings, she'd been trying not to vomit back up the _gagh_ and _racht_ that was thrust in front of her at every Klingon mealtime. She'd lost so much weight over one summer vacation that, on her return to school in the fall, the school nurse had called in B'Elanna's mother, worried that B'Elanna might have contracted some Klingon illness while off-world. Miral had not dealt with the embarrassment of that encounter well.

"I'm sorry," Tom said. "I wasn't trying to annoy you."

"Oh, I'm not annoyed," B'Elanna told him, pleased with the amount of nonchalance she'd been able to inject into her tone. Again, it was difficult to read Tom's expression, but, if he was unconvinced of the truthfulness of her answer, he wasn't disputing it. And it wasn't really him she was annoyed with, not exactly. Her annoyance was with the unpleasant memories his questions had dredged up and with the emotions they'd brought to the surface. With how she could be, for an instant, transformed back into that seven-year-old girl and feel again the inadequacy and humiliation.

Tom thought he understood what she'd gone through as a child: that they'd had parallel experiences and that the pressures he'd been subjected to from his father were comparable to those unattainable demands she'd faced from her mother. But Tom's ambitions and those his father held for him had overlapped to a large extent. Even without the paternal coaching, Tom would have had a strong drive to make something of his life. He'd not had a parent wishing him to achieve the unachievable: a parent expecting him to behave like a Klingon in a half-human body. How could he really understand?


	3. Chapter 3

**3\. Post-Hunters – Stardate 51509**

"If he spends much more time reading that letter, he'll have it memorised."

Standing at the galley counter, B'Elanna followed Tom's gaze to the far corner of the mess hall where Harry sat smiling at a PADD, his dinner steaming and untouched on the table in front of him. She was happy for Harry and she knew that, despite his quip, Tom was too. From her own perspective, successfully downloading Harry's letter from the Hirogen relay network had been the highlight of an incredibly traumatic day: a day that, despite the joy it had brought to many of her shipmates, B'Elanna wished she'd never had to experience, and the sooner it was over with the better.

Harry wasn't the only one reading in the mess hall. On closer inspection, every table seemed to have at least one occupant engaged in the same activity, most of those part of _Voyager_ 's original Starfleet crew rather than Maquis. As B'Elanna ordered a mug of black coffee and a plate of the evening's 'special' from Neelix, Vorik started reading his own letter aloud, prompted, it seemed, by his dining companions, Nicoletti and Swinn.

It was logical to assume that if the Starfleet portion of the crew shared the less personal content of their individual letters, they could get a more complete picture of how life had transpired for their friends and relatives in the Alpha Quadrant after _Voyager_ was lost. Each letter would vary in how much emphasis its sender had placed on specific family matters compared to matters relevant to all. Vorik's letter – from his brother, serving on the _Reliant_ – appeared to contain little in the way of family news, and the mess hall's other conversations hushed to a low murmur as the Vulcan engineer started listing the various communications Starfleet had sent out to their missing officers' next of kin. Until the encrypted message _Voyager_ had received from Starfleet Command could be deciphered, the crew would have to rely on the information in their letters to find out about any searches that had been mounted for the missing starship and about what, in general terms (and if anything), Starfleet had been planning since the Doctor made contact via the _Prometheus_.

"We could take our food back to your quarters if you'd prefer," Tom said, loading a couple of fresh bread rolls from a basket on the counter onto his already congested tray. "Or to mine."

"Don't you want to listen to this?" she asked him, unsure if it was concern for her feelings or discomfort on his own part that had triggered the suggestion.

"I'm not in any particular hurry. It'll all come to light soon enough. You know how quickly news travels on this ship."

She did, and that was why burying her head in the sand and trying to pretend that today hadn't happened would ultimately be a futile if appealing exercise.

It was Dalby's arrival that swayed her. Trailed by a red-faced Gerron and an unusually taciturn Chell, Dalby marched up to the rear of the dinner queue, glaring in Vorik's direction and whispering something to Gerron that made the other man's scowl intensify. For the first time in over two years, B'Elanna sensed here the real possibility of trouble erupting between the Maquis and Starfleet factions. When Chakotay had shared the contents of Sveta's letter, many of the initial outcries of blame for the Maquis massacre had been aimed at Starfleet and at Federation politics. There was also now a fair degree of disgruntlement from a handful of _Voyager_ 's Maquis who felt that some of the Starfleet crew were flaunting their jubilant moods in a way that was completely insensitive to the Maquis situation.

B'Elanna had no desire to be anywhere near any altercation that might develop. She had no wish to join in and no energy to play peacemaker. She'd burned off her earlier felt rage and had cried out her sorrow. Now, all that remained was a disorientating numbness.

"Fine," she told Tom. "We'll eat in your quarters." And, thanking Neelix for whatever the hell he'd just served her up, she trailed Tom out to the turbolift, purposefully avoiding eye contact with the three Maquis that they passed on their way.

It was, perhaps, a little unfair for the Maquis (it had been Henley who first raised the point) to claim that every Starfleet officer was walking around the ship with a silly grin on his or her face. For every few with cause to celebrate there was someone else who'd been given up for dead – whose family and friends had moved on with their lives, in some cases irreversibly breaking the ties that had bound them. Those crewmen weren't in the mess hall. They were holed up alone in their quarters or seeking escape and diversion on the holodeck. And the mood of the crew in general had sobered somewhat since the energy discharge from the quantum singularity had disabled every relay station on the Hirogen network: it wasn't likely that there would be further contact with Starfleet any time soon.

And then there were those who'd received no letter at all. B'Elanna found herself in a select club that, with Tom, Neelix and Seven excluded, comprised of half a dozen other Maquis and the reclusive Starfleet cosmologist, Mortimer Harren. At least Tom knew that his father wasn't ignoring him. And, although Tom's letter had come in the Admiral's name, there was nothing to say that his mother or other family members hadn't included messages within the text. Ayala's message – one of the few letters addressed to one of _Voyager_ 's Maquis that carried good news – had come from his wife, but his two young sons had each written a few lines towards the end, describing their new home on Earth.

While tracking down her mother on Qo'noS might have proved difficult, Starfleet had, presumably, been able to locate John Torres. While hardly an uncommon name, there couldn't be more than one John Torres on Earth who had once lived on the small colony world of Kessik IV. There certainly wouldn't be more than one John Torres who'd married a Klingon woman. It was all there for Starfleet to find in the Federation's citizenship records. B'Elanna knew because she'd accessed those records on _Voyager_.

"He's thinking of throwing an impromptu party," Tom said, entering the turbolift and swivelling around to face forwards. "Neelix, I mean."

B'Elanna paused abruptly on the lift's threshold, momentarily speechless. "A party? Now? You're kidding."

Tom shook his head. "I think it's more of a get-together than a party – and a morale booster rather than a celebration. But I figured that's how you might react to the idea."

"It won't be just me," B'Elanna said, stepping inwards so that the doors could hiss shut, a spark of anger reigniting inside her.

"No, I guessed that."

"And that's why you wanted to get out of there?"

"Partly." He called for deck four and the lift began to move. "I guess I'm also still a little frustrated that, after all the build-up, my letter never made it through. It might've been better if I'd never known it was coming."

"You should write back to him."

"What?"

B'Elanna was almost as shocked as Tom: the words had tripped off her tongue without much conscious forethought. But she didn't regret her suggestion and clarified, "To your father. You could write him a letter."

Tom continued to stare at her, his jaw agape. "Why would I do that?"

She took a few seconds to formulate a reasoned response. "So that when we eventually make contact with Starfleet again you'll have something ready to send to him – to the rest of your family as well."

The turbolift ground to a halt, the doors parting. B'Elanna moved out into the corridor, Tom following after a beat.

"Now that Starfleet knows our approximate location, they should be able to aim a signal more effectively and accurately towards us along our general route home," she added, as Tom remained tight-lipped, his eyes now focused on the food that he carried. "It makes sense that we should have whatever we want to send back to them ready for that eventuality."

"There's no guarantee any datalink they can establish would be bidirectional."

"No," she conceded. "But it might be."

"Is that what you're going to do? Prepare a letter to send home."

And now the regret kicked in. "My situation's not the same. My father didn't write to me."

"He might have."

"No. There'd at least have been a message header in the data packet if he had, I'm sure of it." And the absence of such was really no surprise. After all, why should her father bother to make contact now when he hadn't done in years? What difference would the news that she was stuck in the Delta Quadrant have made to him? He probably hadn't even been aware that she'd joined the Maquis and subsequently gone missing.

Nearing Tom's quarters, B'Elanna slowed down to let him pass her. Detecting his presence, the doors opened automatically and she followed him inside.

He dumped his tray with a clatter onto the table, deftly intercepting a bread roll that made a break towards the floor. "What would I say in a letter anyway?"

Again she took her time before responding. "You could … write about everything you've achieved since you've been on _Voyager_. Places we've visited. Some of the things you've seen."

Surely the Admiral couldn't fail to be impressed by his son's contributions to the effort to get _Voyager_ home – despite whatever grudges he might still harbour over Tom's dishonourable discharge from Starfleet and what that and Tom's subsequent conviction for treason had meant for the Paris family reputation.

"What I think of as my greatest achievements on this ship aren't necessarily the same as those my father would hold in the highest esteem."

She knew Tom valued the respect he'd worked hard to gain from his crewmates, the personal and professional relationships he'd cultivated, and how he'd been able to bolster crew morale by creating Sandrine's and by modifying some of the ship's pre-installed holoprograms to make them more exciting. "But there'd be some common ground, wouldn't there?" she asked him. There had to be.

Tom set his attention to spreading butter onto the salvaged roll, replying eventually with, "Like you said earlier, it's been four years – longer than that, actually, since I've seen or heard from my dad. I don't know what he might consider important these days," and adding a flippant, "Hell, for all I know he's retired from Starfleet and joined a Vulcan monastery."

Which sounded about as likely as her own father taking a job on a Klingon freighter. With a sigh, she took a step back from Tom, wondering now if toughing it out in the mess hall might have made for a less strained mealtime after all.

"But, I'll think about the letter," he said then, in a much softer tone. "If it'll make you happy."

Would it make her happy? Right now, she couldn't imagine anything much lifting her mood. Or non-mood. And it wasn't for her sake that he should consider the idea. But she offered him the best smile she could muster and sat down on his sofa, balancing her plate on her lap and picking through her food to segregate the large cubes that she suspected were leola root hiding among the tomatoes and a mysterious selection of grains.

A few moments later, he moved across the room to join her, and it occurred to her then that, in the three years since _Voyager_ had encountered that Romulan captain through the decaying 'Harry Kim wormhole', she'd never asked Tom if, like the majority of the crew, he'd taken that previous opportunity to write a brief personal message to his family. He'd never brought the subject up and never asked her the same. Now wasn't really the best time to indulge her curiosity, and that reluctance was compounded by the diminishing level of steam rising up from her meal: while warm, it was at least reasonably palatable.

So, she let the matter rest. Sooner or later, no doubt, it would come to the fore once again. But, for now, she'd thought enough about events both past and present in the Alpha Quadrant.


End file.
